What Urban Hunger Looks Like Now

In her work, the photographer Joey O’Loughlin captures the diverse reality of New York’s food pantry lines.

On East 11th Street between Avenues B and C in New York City’s East Village, the line for the Father’s Heart food pantry wraps around the block. On cold winter days, people bundle up in puffer coats to hold their place; they might be outside, standing still, for as long as three hours.

The surrounding neighborhood is hip, and expensive. Locals walk their dogs through Tompkins Square Park, sipping delicately crafted cappuccinos. Commuters hop on Citi Bikes and spin off to their jobs. Joggers pass by in designer gear. If they notice the line, they don’t acknowledge it.

“I should have asked them: how many of you know that this a food pantry line?” says the photographer Joey O’Loughlin.

The line at Father’s Heart Pantry wraps around the block on Saturday mornings. In this
trendy and expensive corner of the Lower East Side, neighbors sometimes walk on by,
unaware. (Joey O’Loughlin)

“I think most Americans have an image of hunger that’s based on Dust Bowl images—Jacob Riis, the breadlines, Dorothea Lange’s photographs,” O’Loughlin adds. “So when it’s people who are wearing black or pink puffer coats, we don’t get it. When it’s people carrying their bags of food next to you on the subway, or talking on their phone, and they look like everybody else you see out in the city, we don’t get it. Hunger in this city is hidden.”

It’s something that O’Loughlin knows firsthand. Before she began photographing the pantries, she tells CityLab that she didn’t register the long lines, either. “I’ve been in New York for almost 20 years,” she says. “How did I not see them?”

Every day in New York City, thousands of people stand in line for hours, waiting
for a bag of groceries at local food pantries. The pantry bag is the new normal for families whose incomes can no longer keep pace with the cost of living. (Joey O’Loughlin)

There are over 600 food pantries in the five boroughs; 1.4 million New Yorkers rely on assistance from either pantries or soup kitchens to survive amid the city’s ever-escalting cost of living, says Carol Schneider, an associate director at Food Bank for New York City, which stocks the pantries. O’Louglin’s photographs, on displayat the Brooklyn Historical Society through November 5 in the exhibitionHidden in Plain Sight: Portraits of Hunger in NYC, bring the realityout into the open.

And it’s not just in New York; nationwide, 14 percent of households are food insecure, 6 percent extremely so. Food insecurity affects every county, every congressional district. Even in Loudon County, Virginia, the wealthiest district in America and one of eight counties with a median income of over $100,000 per year, more than 10,000 children are affected by low food security.

Minimum-wage worker Dina Garcia, left, a 42-year-old mother of two little girls, uses pantries for groceries and sometimes goes to a soup kitchen that offers family dinners. (Joey O’Loughlin)

O’Loughlin visited around 40 pantries throughout the city and in the end, focused on ten, where she spent three years photographing and talking to people in line and those serving them. As she grew more invested in her project, she would tell people about it. “But they’d say, ‘Oh, I know food pantries. They’re for homeless people,’” she says.

Food pantries tell a complicated story. There were people with advanced degrees, O’Loughlin says; people who were students or artists. There were crossing guards, parks department employees, doormen, home health aids. There were people who had long been unemployed; people in their 40s and 50s who had once held jobs in advertising or middle management, but could no longerfind work. The assumption is that people on these lines are unemployed, Schneider says. But one in five are working, many at more than one job. It’s just not enough.

This woman waiting in line at the River Fund Pantry in Richmond Hill, Queens, is a student and artist. (Joey O’Loughlin)

“The city is relentless,” O’Loughlin says. Many subsidy programs, such as for housing or health care, require applicants to jump through hoops, O’Loughlin adds. There are waitlists and forms. For the food pantries, you just have to show up. There are rules—you can only visit a pantry on your designated day, for example—but many people register at more than location and wait in different lines throughout the month.

In Midwood, families line up on Fridays for bread for Sabbath dinner. Keeping Kosher
is hard for families who live in poverty. The food tends to be more expensive and the
number of Kosher pantries is limited. (Joey O’Loughlin)

“It all comes down to a balance,” O’Loughlin says. “What does it say that all of these people have calculated that it’s worth the travel time and the waiting time to get these bags?” The food bags, she adds, were originally intended as emergency provisions for people in the aftermath of a crisis like a house fire. Now, they’re something that people consistently factor in when managing their monthly resources. Crisis has become the norm.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Paul McKay’s thriving luxury renovation business in New Jersey was leveled and his marriage crumbled. Now, neither Paul, an Irish immigrant, nor his new wife Judy, a nanny, are working in full-time positions. They struggle to support their fledgling family and have relied on local pantries when work is scarce. (Joey O’Loughlin)

“The food pantries are a wonderful thing,” O’Loughlin says. “The donated food allows for a sense of family, a sense of safety, in a very harsh economic climate.” But still, she adds, there has to be another solution: one that will directly address the poverty and low wages that necessitate the food lines.

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It is no coincidence that O’Loughlin’s photos have gone up on exhibit during an election year. “This is an issue that cuts through all layers of society,” she says. Following the November 2013 bill that cut funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the pantries themselves, Schneider adds, have been stretched to full capacity; O’Loughlin’s photographs show a bandageat its breaking point. “People just have to get paid enough,” O’Loughlin says. “Nobody wants to stand on the lines.”

Patrick Dolby is 46 years old and disabled by AIDS. He was outed in the military,
dishonorably discharged, and never completely regained his footing; he worked for
Housing Works for years and depends on food pantries to get by. He tracks his living expenses down to the penny. (Joey O’Loughlin)Emily Diac, age five, waits while her mother shops at a pantry in Richmond Hill. One in four New York City children doesn’t have enough to eat; her mother didn’t want Emily or her brothers to be part of that statistic, so they relocated to Marietta, Georgia. (Joey O’Loughlin)In any season, pantry lines form before the sun rises; people are anxious to get the best offerings, fresh food priced out of reach in supermarkets. (Joey O’Loughlin)